Tools of the Trade: A Carer Discusses The Need For Prescription Management.

As a dedicated carer, it can be overwhelming to manage the care and overall health of the people you see and tend to every day. It’s an essential part of the job, but staying on top of the client’s medical needs and ensuring that medicines are properly administered can be quite difficult.

I work with three aged patients, all home bound and each with a distinct set of needs and medical attention. There’s Muriel, she’s seventy-two and has chronic asthma. And there’s Robert, who’s eighty six and has early onset Alzheimer’s. Then there’s Linda, a feisty Argentine lady with bad arthritis and glaucoma. Each of them has a different home situation, but each of them looks to me to organise their medical affairs so as to keep them as comfortable and as healthy as possible.

Part of the difficulty of maintaining such constant care for a few people is that the wires can occasionally be crossed, resulting in oversights and occasional stress for both me and my patients. About two months ago a simple mix-up nearly set the situation off, and since then I’ve been trying a new method for staying on top of these kinds of things. It was simple: instead of getting Linda’s prescription refilled, I accidentally used Robert’s prescription and wound up delivering the wrong medicine to the client’s home. That afternoon, as I was preparing Linda’s weekly pill box, I noticed something odd about the large yellow pills in my hands. I checked the prescription, and low and behold they were Robert’s!

It was an incredibly close call and a moment I am not professionally proud of. I had been under a lot of time pressure and I was experiencing general fatigue, but I resolved to learn from my mistake and never fill the wrong prescription again. I began to re-organise my prescription filing system, but wanted to find a way to make sure that the right prescription was being delivered at the right time to the right patient.

Over a dinner with a few University friends, a colleague of mine (a fellow carer) mentioned an Application she’d been using on her phone, MedicineList+ . She said that it had been tremendously useful in managing prescriptions, dosages and delivery schedules. I’m not particularly savvy when it comes to technology, so my friend asked for my phone and set about typing. A minute or two later, we opened the Application. Going through it together, I could see how easy it was to use and just how much it could help me organise the care I offered.

Over the next few days, I tried to get acquainted with the program, to see just how useful it could be. The App let the user to keep on top of the general health of different users and any medicines that might be needed by drawing together a general medicines list. It also allowed me to record health conditions, medicines, measurements, medical tests and results, all parts of my daily job. Crucially, reminders and other notifications could be set so that medicine use was tracked and notices for re-filling issued. This meant that there would be no more unsightly mix-ups and ensured healthy, happy patients.

I would strongly recommend MedicineList+ as an essential tool of the trade for care-givers and other health care professionals. It has changed the way I approach Muriel, Linda and Robert’s needs and has guaranteed that their care has been consistent and always on-time. Since I began using the application, there have been no more incidents or mistakes, and my patients are never at risk. MedicineList+ has made me feel more professionally adept and on-top of my ever-increasing workload.